Apple adds live news channels to TV app for iOS and Apple TV

After teasing the feature back in September, Apple is adding support for live news in the TV app on the iPhone, iPad and Apple TV — 9to5mac first spotted the new section. For now, it’s quite limited as it only supports a handful of channels for American users.

If you’re running the most recent versions of iOS and tvOS, the feature should now be live. I’m running iOS 11.2.5 on my iPhone and the new section is available without any additional update.

On the main ‘Watch Now’ tab, if you scroll past your ‘Up Next’ queue and the top recommendations, there’s a new ‘News’ section. It features six different live streams — CBS News, CNN, Fox News, Cheddar, CNBC and Bloomberg.

If you tap on one of those icons, it launches the live stream in each of those apps. The TV app uses deep-linking to go straight to the live stream.

And if you don’t have the app yet, your device is going to ask you if you want to download the app from the App Store. This new feature should drive downloads for those six companies.

Once you have those apps on your device, you can ask Siri to “Watch Bloomberg” so that you don’t even have to open up the TV app in the first place. Let’s hope Apple is going to bring this live news feature to other countries.